Katey Rich agreed to email me any quotes she’d attributed to me before submitting her article for publication, so that I’d have a chance to review them and okay them or send slight revisions of my statements before they were printed. My experience in New Orleans is very difficult to explain, and I was nervous about doing an interview because I was afraid that a lot of the contours of it would be completely flattened out. I did not know that the article was to appear in the Friday edition of the Argus, and I understand that it is a pretty difficult feat to write an article of that length in such a short time. However, if she knew she couldn’t let me read my quotes, she should have said so when I asked about it.
In particular, the last quote attributed to me is really upsetting. Rich’s preface, “she said she focused on not becoming too wrapped up in the gravity of what she saw…” makes it sound like I spent a week skipping through storm damage. Uh, I didn’t. The photos I too—f the house we gutted, a litter of kittens rescued from a contaminated home, and the action at Martin Luther King Schoo—eflect the fact that I did want to remain as positive as possible. I am an optimist, and I did not want to become debilitated by what I saw. But it’s pretty fucking impossible not to feel the gravity of that situation, and I never tried to ignore anything. And unlike the majority of Wesleyan students on the trip, I was forced to contend with the fact that there are still many, many people who would like to see people like me eliminated. It was important to me to discover how people were coping with this situation, and to approach it myself in the most productive way possible. I was amazed by the fact that yes, people are still finding ways to enjoy life in order to survive. I tried to focus on the fact that there are people who care and are working to fix things, particularly when we entered Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School.
I did take a couple of pictures when I was inside, of a banner which said, “Welcome to Our School, Where No Child Is Left Behind,” but my SD card spontaneously deleted them. I quickly stopped taking pictures anyway because I couldn’t be in that building without cleaning. When I first walked in I thought the amount of dirt and mold would drive me crazy, so I just started sweeping and scratching through the thick layer of crud until I could see a small patch of (relatively) clean flooring. Identifying small problems and resolving them made me feel a lot better. I wanted to focus on the fact that we were working to remedy the situation instead of succumbing to the feelings of nausea and helplessness that kept threatening to knock me over, especially as we entered the library.
I love books. I love reading, and I loved elementary school. Looking at thousands of moldy, rotting books, shoveling them into wheelbarrows, and dumping them by the side of the road definitely ranks among the worst experiences I’ve ever had. Thinking about how I would feel as an eight-year-old being told that I couldn’t go back to school, or seeing the books I loved in piles awaiting transport to a dumpster, depresses the hell out of me. At first I was comforted to think that we were clearing them out so they could be replaced with new ones, on new shelves, in a bright, newly redone library. But then I remembered that we’d entered the school illegally and that no plans had been made to reopen the school at all. We might be doing all of this for nothing. I kept cleaning because the dirt was so unbelievable that I couldn’t be anywhere near that building without trying to do something about it. I’m getting nauseous and anxious and itchy right now just thinking about it.
The next day a couple of FEMA assessors stopped by the school and started acting interested in what we were doing, and in inventory or something. I don’t really remember exactly what they were doing, as I was in the back room of the library battling the dirt and the occasional clusters of multi-legged creatures who’d taken up residence in a number of the books. I’m terrified of bugs but at that point I wasn’t even afraid of them; I just resented them for outliving all these books, and thousands of people. At lunchtime a reporter from some website interviewed me and I told him how frustrating it was not to know if they’d re-open the school. Lisa from Common Ground heard me and said, “We’ll get it open.” At that moment I wanted to hit her; I think it was her tone, and my exhaustion and frustration. I wanted to get drunk (after all, it was St. Patrick’s Day). And then I wanted to go back to Olin and sit in the stacks and read, or even just smell the books. I cannot get enough of that smell now; I just breathe and breathe in the stacks, and each time I breathe out I feel jealous of the air exiting my nose and possessive of the next wave of scent coming in. I get scared that I’m going to forget the scent or that something’s going to happen and destroy it in the moment before I can take my next breath. I have been having a really weird sort of fun the past week or so, collecting books for my research papers.
Anyway, I’m very glad that all that happened at the end of my trip, because I wouldn’t have been able to stay much longer, feeling the way I did that Friday afternoon. I’m also glad I had fun in the French Quarter before I left, because there is more to New Orleans than destruction and chaos and people should experience that too. It is a wonderful city, full of amazing, multidimensional people who should not be viewed simply as victims (or looters, or burdens, or any of a number of stock images that are routinely invoked in the discourse on this storm). I want to go back as soon as I can and continue to work.
It’s actually 5:00 on Saturday morning as I’m writing this and I’m tired. I haven’t said a fraction of what I wanted to say when I first got out of bed and I don’t know that what I’ve said is totally clear or if everything followed logically from what came before it, but I don’t feel like going back and thinking about it anymore. It just has to stop. Katey, I’m sorry that you probably stayed up really late writing that article, but I’m pretty pissed that you flattened out my experience so much.
You said I gave you pages and pages of information, and I’m sure not all of it was coherent and that it’s hard to type and get everything, blah blah blah blah blah. The format is probably also to blame; there’s obviously not enough room for everything. But every other time I’ve been interviewed for a print publication, and in every interview I’ve conducted, the interviewer has submitted the questions beforehand to give the interviewee time to think about her responses before the interview and/or sent a draft of the article out to all parties concerned to make sure that no one was misrepresented. If you knew you had to write an article for Friday’s paper you should have had your interviews done well before Thursday. We’ve been back from Spring Break long enough that if you knew you were going to do this, you had plenty of time. If you could throw together a fairly decent article in a few hours, imagine what you could have gotten if you’d started earlier.
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